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Friday, January 29, 2010

So this week's video for youtube is something a bit different. After people asked me to do some Guitar Hero ones I borrowed the game from a friend and decided to do one.

I had intended to record several of them and release them little by little but as my former entry stated, GH kind of indirectly killed my xbox.

Being that I mostly play Rock Band I really had quite a few bones to pick with Guitar Hero..

So here is my list of issues I had with GH5.

1. I had to play the game in PAL-60, not only did this irritate me because I couldn't capture in color with my Dazzle, but it indirectly gave me the E74 error with my xbox2. I could not for the life of me find a place to turn off the vocal track while playing. I found sound options and turned down vocals as much as it would go and the mic all the way up but it didn't seem to change anything. It MUST exist somewhere but I didn't find it in GH's messy interface (albeit less bad than GH:WT) 3. Guitar Hero is way quieter than Rock Band. I have to crank up my stereo volume just to hear it and then get blown away when I put RB in. I again looked for sound options to help with this and didn't find anything relevant to what I was trying to do.4. The other default band players are ALWAYS the same.. I really HATE Judy Nails with a passion and want her poser ass the fuck out of my band.

As with all these kind of games I enjoyed making my character. In this song I use my "Anex" character. My only beef with GH character creation is the women are still too skinny. If you increase the weight it actually just stretches the model horizontally which looks really stupid and not so much that they aren't anorexic. The game also tries to be too realistic. I kind of find all the character models rather creepy and they all seem a bit edgy.. there is just something about it I don't like. I DO like the color customization and outift choices, I also like that choosing a hat doesn't make me change my hair cut.

But anyway back to the actual song:

)

Smells Like Teen Spirit on GH (or even RB for that matter) is not all that hard. The only hard part I found personally was the "Hello Hello Hello How Low" parts. They were a bit low but there isn't much room to breathe in there to go straight to the next part after.Bonus tid-bit for the week: This week's intro/outro features Nightwish- Devil and the Deep Dark Ocean. I really love this song and the album is quickly becoming one of my favorites (I had lacked 4 of Nightwish's Tarja-Era Albums, but recently found them online Nightwish: 1997-2001 BOX.) I love Tarja's scream in this song. It's like an uncontrolled hauntingly powerful operatic wail.. I dunno I just love it.

I actually had the idea while having a night of some minor insomnia because of an over active brain. I figured the only way to solve the problem so I could sleep was to decide to act on it and write down my thoughts.

You're probably wondering how this ties into gaming, well for me it does because each week I upload one gaming video to youtube. I have about 200 subscribers, it's not a huge feat (though I'm grateful for all my subscribers and anyone who stops by) but my little Rock band videos are apparently a big deal enough to attract a troll who likes to come and rate them one star. In so doing, my rating goes from 5 star average to 4.5 stars. I was a little annoyed at first but the more I think about it the more I start to be flattered by it.

There are a lot of really great and awesome players out there in the Guitar Hero/Rock band youtube video making world. You got some who have 10,000 or so subscribers! Most for their skill, others for their look (or friendly co-hosts *cough*) but there are so many interesting people out there that I wouldn't even think for a second that my little videos warrant a troll but he/she has proven me wrong.

Seeing as I don't really have an xbox right now (UPS will come to pick it up tomorrow), I have other side projects (like this one) that I have time to work on. So with that I dedicate this parody to my troll:

Today we salute you, Mr. 1-Star Rating YouTube Troll Guy,(Mr. 1-Star Rating YouTube Troll Guy)Every community needs its troll and here you’ve found your niche,With 10 different accounts you can knock down a 5 star rating all by yourself.(They’re subbed to each other)Angry at the world for not having any friends or a girlfriend to otherwise occupy you,You take all that rejection and turn it into a low rating YouTube apocalypse. (It’s LinkinPark time!)You’re there to prevent a 5 star rating and if someone dares to vote down one of your comments, you log another account and vote it right back up.(Cower in ph34rof my l33t skillz!)So crack open an ice cold Bud Light Mr. 1-Star Rating YouTube Troll Guy,This 1 star rating is on me.(Mr. 1-Star Rating YouTube Troll Guy)

I took this parody a step further than just writing it though.. I actually found the background music and did the narration and singing (albeit horribly) by myself.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Today I had intended to write an entry about how much I hate Guitar Hero 5... well while I still intend to tell you the original reasons why I hate Guitar Hero 5 (though not in today's entry), I have a larger one to add to the list to tell you about unfortunately.

Today I got the dreaded E74 xbox error. I'm going to partially blame Guitar Hero 5 on this one. As far as I know (and this seems specific to my case)this error is related to video/graphical hardware problem.

It happened that I was actually working on a video for next week, a Guitar Hero vocal video, just to switch it up a bit. I use a dazzle to capture the in-game footage, but my dazzle seems to be compatible with PAL only. As I live in Europe this normally isn't an issue. With my xbox I have the display options of PAL-60 and PAL-50. For my dazzle to record in color I have to have my xbox on PAL-50, being that you can't really see the difference I've always just left it there. I've never had to worry about changing it except to play Guitar Hero 5 actually.The game was purchased in France (where I live) and clearly states "PAL" on the back but for some reason it tells me it is not compatible with PAL-50, so I had to put my xbox in PAL-60 (a fake NTSC if you will) to be able to play it. This kind of rather sucked as my dazzle would only record in black in white, but I went ahead and did it anyway.

After I got a video recorded, I decided to work on a Rock Band project I had planned to do with fellow Team Cena member dpritch. Well since Rock Band actually lets me play in PAL-50 with no complaints I decided to switch back my display settings so I could record in color at least. I went ahead and changed my settings back to PAL-50 and headed through the xbox panes over to "Play Rock Band 2". As I was passing through the frames I noticed that my xbox avatar looked weird.. she had all kinds of lines going through her and she wasn't whole. She was rather graphically messed up. I figured it might be because I had just changed my settings and decided to give my xbox a nice restart...

When I turned it on it sounded strange, nothing was on the screen and then suddenly I see:

I tried everything I could think of, praying that this wasn't really happening.. but nothing worked. I took the HDD off, I tried a HDMI cable instead of the furnished component one.. but no luck, I was left with no choice but to call Microsoft.

Calling Microsoft was a pain though, luckily you're given the option to speak to someone in English (despite the fact I called the French number), but I guess they outsource their tech support to some country where the people don't speak English natively. Don't get me wrong the twice I called (yeah I had to call twice for something not their fault) I spoke to two very nice and helpful women but it was so hard for me to understand them, we had awkward moments of silence and misunderstandings.

Anyway the good news is that for E-74 the repairs will be covered, so I won't have to pay for anything. The bad news is that I need to find a box at a store. All the stores had already closed for the day when this happened and things in France are always closed on Sunday so I have to wait till Monday. Then I got to schedule a pick up and after that it is about 2 weeks wait. Knowing my luck RBN will be released and I won't get to pounce on the Amberian Dawn songs like I've been dying to do for months now.. -sigh-.

Friday, January 22, 2010

As a member of Team Cena I post gameplay videos of Rock Band 2 every week on youtube. My sponsored instrument is vocals, so that is what my videos mostly consist of. The videos I post are split screen (meaning you can see me AND the gameplay at the same time). I decided to do this after asking my subscribers what they would like to see and looking for something to make my videos a bit more entertaining. I also play with the original vocal track turned all the way down just because it is more fun that way.

What I would like to do (and intend to do) is post here every week with a bit more insight into my video for that week. I generally record them on Thursdays and upload them shortly after. It really depends on the amount of time/work I have involved.

So this week I did Rob Zombie- Superbeast (DLC). I found this song to be REALLY fun for my last 2 videos (I had done a bonus guitar one). It may just be that this is a genre of music I enjoy (outside of my usual symphonic metal) whereas usually there aren't too many songs on Rock Band I actually like (that will change with the RBN).

For my guitar video, skill wise it wasn't too hard. Expert guitar isn't my primary instrument, but it is what I started Rock Band on (from previously playing Guitar Hero). My main difficulty was actually a physical issue: my finger nails. As I tried to slide down to catch the yellow/orange "chords" my finger nails would actually catch the raised frets on the guitar and I'd end up missing. I'm pretty sure that if I worked at it (and cut my finger nails) I would probably FC (full clear) it without a problem.Overall fun song and honestly not hard at all on expert guitar.

Vocally I would say this song wasn't too challenging either. It mostly consisted of talkies that were pretty easy to manage. The hard part for me I would say, was the " a ragged they come and a ragged they kill" phrase.I really struggle with low marked stuff, so I didn't sing it in original octave. It came out a bit higher (and stranger) sounding than the original. Even in doing this I barely made the phrases. Looking back at the video I honestly don't know how I did. The pitch marker was so often in the red. One of the mysteries of the game I guess.I also didn't manage to activate overdrive at minute mark 2:47.. I don't know if it's an early window or what.. I honestly hate that though, especially when I'm recording my weekly video, but I'm honestly not the kind of person who looking up optimal paths as I personally hate score whoring songs.

Slightly off topic I did happily wear my Knights of the Ebon Blade shirt for this video. If you play World of Warcraft you know what I'm talkin' about. Being that my main is a Death Knight tank, I really am attached to my shirt :)

Monday, January 18, 2010

Yesterday was just one of those days on WoW.. you know those days? The ones where you sit in the LFG queue for 5 hours waiting to get a group while the queue time of lies tell you "Average queue time 46 seconds" just to mock you?

Yeah that was yesterday, but it was worse... we only lacked 1 person, a dps. A DPS! The ONE group role that is the easiest to fill because everyone and their dog plays dps. We had been waiting a good 20 minutes before we finally got one and when we finally did we were eager to get moving. The instance was Pit of Sauron Saron, I asked if anyone needed the quest and when everyone confirmed they didn't we decided to skip the Jaina blah blah and get going.

We decided to take that little sneaky path to the right to skip mobs that we didn't care about. All was lookin' good until our newly acquired dps decided he wanted to be the subject of one of my blogs.

First, I got to give credit where it's due... I read some of these over on Psynister's Notebook who had actually gotten the idea from Darraxus and his Real Azeroth Heroes posts, who probably over heard something similar from the Keebler elves while walking outside..

Anyway, if you're familiar with (and enjoy) the "Real Men of Genius" radio commercials by a famous alcoholic beverage maker then you'll probably find this right up your alley:

Today I woke up and had something running through my head that sounded like a good idea: post a little witty blog related to anything and everything involving my gaming. (I had a funny little thing I wanted to post about World of Warcraft).I'll admit that this probably only sounded good to me this morning because my brain wasn't awake enough to fully comprehend the task at hand. I expected to just sign up on any ol' blogging site and start writing my silly little WoW story and be off to a great and easy start.. but man this blogging game sure is hard to start.The first part was finding a blog site. I went straight to where I had read other blogs some of my friends had and tried to start there. Only problem is I'm one of those people who can't stand to play a game that has crappy graphics. I found one that seemed nice at first glance but once you started playing the thing it demanded you PAY a yearly subscription to have access to all their shiny fancy graphics. I was really annoyed it wasn't written on the box before I wasted my time with it but there was just no way I could even stand it with their few (and not very interesting) pre-made themes. I quickly decided this game just wasn't worth it. I had spent far too much time for something that was just supposed to be something I could jump right into. Lucky for me though I know other gamers who have played these blogging games before and was pointed to blogger.com by PMS BangBangSo I'm here, a nice little blog that allows me to have pretty graphics and is free (we like free). Let's see if this game is as entertaining as my brain in a sleep deprived state thought it would be.

About The Author

I'm just a girl who likes metal music, video games and lives in a foreign country.
Opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer nor my affiliated associations.